An ESP8266 Based Smartmeter

During these last weeks we’ve been talking a lot about the ESP8266, a $4 microcontroller based Wifi module. As the SDK was recently released by Espressif a lot of cheap Internet of Things applications were made possible.

[Thomas] used one module to make a simple smartmeter measuring the active time of his heater together with the outside temperature. He added 2 AT commands starting/stopping the logging process and used one GPIO pin to monitor the heater’s oil pump state. The measurements are then periodically pushed via a TCP connection to his data collecting server, which allows him to generate nice graphs.

In the video embedded below you’ll see [Thomas] demoing his system. On his hackaday.io project page he put up a very detailed explanation on how to replicate his awesome project. All the resources he used and create can also be downloaded on the project’s GitHub page.

17 thoughts on “An ESP8266 Based Smartmeter

    1. One thing you guys should think about: security.
      Make sure that you have the sources for the firmware so nobody has implemented a backdoor. As nice as the ESP8266 is, I think we also should think a bit about security especially when talking about applications like you mentioned.

        1. no thats not what I meant :P
          its not about the garage door as this is way too specific, but its about credentials and if you use the device to secure parts of your house its not a good thing that all you need is WiFi access.

        2. I thought a bit about it and it is actually even worse.
          Someone posts a IoT FW with some fancy stuff, maybe a small webserver running on it to toggle GPIOs or whatever. It sends the SSID, PW and MAC (plus maybe the “title” of the IoT, something like “garage door opener” to the attacker. The attacker is now having the WAN IP which he can use in a first approach to get the approximate location. After filtering interesting victims the attacker can use the google localization to get the exact Position of the victim. The rest you can think of your own… So as I said, be aware of Firmwares you find on the web. I dont say this is going to happen but there is the risk.

  1. I love parts like the ESP8266, they just come out of nowhere and revolutionize stuff.

    Actually, it begs the question why more parts like this don’t exist. I guess it’s because the hobbyist-hacker market is so sadly small.

  2. This is very possible and very little people are sharing source codes which mostly not working. Beware.For some even offering cloud update. A hacker could post bin file that before any response it configure and send your access point info. Nothing more stupid than this. Hah

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